Contentions

When I postulated in a short post last week that comedienne Kathy Griffin would have faced a more dire fate than being hectored by the Catholic Leauge’s Bill Donohue had she made a joke about Muhammad rather than Jesus, Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald succumbed to his usual hysterics, running off a thousand-plus word screed grouping me alongside “right-wing warmongers” like Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Mark Steyn, and calling my fears fantasies.

Not to needle the ever-excitable Greenwald, but in related news about the over-exaggerated Muslim threat that only exists in the minds of “right-wing warmongers,” the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, has called for the death of Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks for—what else?—drawing a picture of Muhammad. Demonstrating a real entrepreneurial spirit, al-Baghdadi offered a “50 per cent bonus if Mr. Vilks was ‘slaughtered like a lamb’ by having his throat cut.”

Swedish police have placed Vilks under their protection. According to the Times (London), a spokesperson for the Swedish phone company Ericsson says that it has instructed its employees “to keep a low profile in Muslim countries and to take extra care in deciding where to go or park their cars.” The feckless Swedish ambassador to Saudi Arabia met with the head of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, offering his “deepest apologies for the controversy created by the publishing of the hurtful depiction.” I must have imagined this, too, right?

Fortunately, Mr. Vilks has responded to the bounty placed on his head with good humor, telling the Times, “I suppose that this makes my art project a bit more serious. It is also good to know how much one is worth.” Greenwald might want to consider emulating Lars Vilks’s sense of humor. All those tantrums have to be taxing.